Ultra wideband (UWB) technology in communication networks and services is becoming more popular. Some previous designs use a monopole antenna that is perpendicular to a ground plane, however, the geometry of those designs do not provide a pattern shape desired for many applications, because they have a peak at approximately 45 degrees above the horizon. As a result, for many applications those previous designs require tilting the entire antenna assembly down to move the peak closer to the horizon, and even then the peak is not at the horizon in all azimuth directions, further limiting its usefulness. However, this does not result in an efficient, cost effective, clean, and easy to implement structure. The overall volume increases, the large ground plane is cumbersome, and the design is not easily expanded to a multi-sector antenna configuration, or a high gain multi-element array configuration.
Other previous designs used printed circuit antennas, but typically have limited bandwidth capabilities, to achieve multi-band (or broad band) performance many of these printed circuit antennas use different boards for different frequency bands. This increases overall size and cost and often requires additional combining and/or splitting hardware to combine the bands which further increases cost and complexity.
To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have been used, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common to the figures.